Yesterday, I wrote here about columnist George Will’s strange disagreement with the massive scientific consensus on global warming. I say “strange” simply because Will is smarter than your average denier of climate science. Today, my target is bigger and includes lots of folks who are George Will’s intellectual lessers. Let’s start with the fact that both sides in the debate over global warming have one thing in common: Hardly anybody really wants it to be true that climate-change trends pose a a...

One of the great problems facing Republicans who can actually read without moving their lips is that their party, for the most part, is one in which the tail often wags the dog. The GOP’s extreme right wing generally holds sway, even if its anti-intellectualism is an embarrassment to party members of reasonable intelligence. Consider, for example, the party’s overall antipathy toward the scientific consensus in matters of climate change and the origins of human life. Any Republican politician who doesn’t share that...

In the eight-plus years I’ve been writing this blog, it’s been fun to occasionally aim jibes at the Republican Party for what seems to be its antipathy toward matters of science. I’ve jibed the GOP from time to time for its global-warming denialism, its rejection of theories of biological evolution and various other examples of the party’s stubborn refusal to accept the overwhelming consensus among academics on certain subjects. There’s great satisfaction, I’ll admit, in portraying one’s...

Let me stipulate at the outset here that I am not a scientist. Far from it. But I try my best to understand science, and I become frustrated by people who reject scientific consensus without a shred of good evidence — or any evidence, in some cases — simply because it runs counter to their political, cultural or religious beliefs. It’s that way with evolution and global warming. I know people who can’t bring themselves to embrace either concept — but also can’t offer scientific reasons for their dissent....

Paul Krugman NAILS IT: [The Republican Party’s] intellectual evolution (or maybe more accurately, its devolution) has reached a point of no return, in which allegiance to false doctrines has become a crucial badge of identity… Once upon a time it was possible to take climate change seriously while remaining a Republican in good standing. Today, listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated… And truly crazy positions are becoming the norm. A decade ago, only the G.O.P.’s extremist fringe asserted that global...